Born Out of Time

Wynton Marsalis and his
contemporaries recapitulate modern jazz

by Francis Davis

JUST eighteen when he made his debut with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the
trumpeter Wynton Marsalis answered the prayers of those who feared that the
clock was running out for jazz, as it clearly already had for the blues. Most
of the surviving heroes of swing and bebop were in decline, and the prevailing
wisdom was that no successors were in the wings. But here was an immensely
gifted musician still in his teens who played straight-ahead jazz, rather than
funk or fusion. That he was a black second-generation jazzman (the son of the
obscure pianist Ellis Marsalis) from New Orleans, the city generally
acknowledged to be the birthplace of jazz, was taken as an especially good
omen.

This was in 1980, and Marsalis has since achieved a celebrity rare for a
contemporary jazz musician, partly as a result of his parallel career in
classical music. At twenty-six he is no longer a prodigy. He is now four years
older than Miles Davis was when he recorded the first of his classic nonet
sessions, two years older than Clifford Brown was when he recorded "Jordu" and
"Joy Spring." It is time to ask if Marsalis has fulfilled his potential, what
his influence has been on musicians his own age and younger, and whether he has
expanded the audience for jazz, as many hoped that he would.

The answer to the first question is a qualified yes. With his chill tone and
jabbing attack, Marsalis still echoes Miles Davis, just as he did eight years
ago with Blakey. Moreover, now that Marsalis leads his own band, he takes his
cues from the quintet that Davis led from 1964 to 1967, which included the
pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Ron Carter, the drummer Tony Williams and
the saxophonist Wayne Shorter (who is still the primary role model for
Marsalis's brother, the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, older than Wynton by one
year and a former member of his group). Yet Marsalis has made progress in
finding a voice of his own. There is a sly wit to his half-valve work that owes
nothing to Davis, although it does recall the veteran trumpeter Clark Terry,
one of Davis's early influences. Another sign of Marsalis's enhanced
individuality is the way he has zeroed in on the most provocative aspect of the
Davis Quintet's music from the middle sixties: its circling,
now-you-hear-it-now-you-don't approach to the beat.

Marsalis is one of very few jazz musicians able to line up enough work to keep
a band together full-time, and his rapport with his rhythm section on the
recent Marsalis Standard Time--Volume 1 (Columbia FC-40461) attests to the
virtues of stability in personnel. There are moments when Marsalis, the pianist
Marcus Roberts, the bassist Robert Leslie Hurst III, and the drummer Jeff Watts
sound as though they were playing in four different time signatures. But
actually they are stretching a basic quadruple meter four different ways,
accenting different beats in every measure, and trusting that the listener will
feel the downbeat in his bones. The effect is mesmerizing, and it would be
beyond the ken of a group hastily assembled for a recording date.

Marsalis Standard Time--Volume 1 is the first of Marsalis's albums (discounting
a best-forgotten 1984 encounter with strings) to be mostly given over to
vintage pop songs of the sort that provided excellent vehicles for improvisers
from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane but that too many younger musicians have
rejected in favor of their own compositions. The album is a reminder of the
outstretched hand that such songs have long offered to audiences trying to find
a point of entry into jazz. Although the reckless tempos frequently reduce the
melodies to unrecognizable blurs, the hint of familiarity left in the standards
"Caravan," "April in Paris," "Foggy Day," "The Song Is You," and "Autumn
Leaves" brings the Marsalis quartet's rhythmic cunning into a sharp focus
lacking in his other albums.

The two songs on the album that are Marsalis originals--a fleet blues and an
almost motionless ballad--seem out of place, not because they are intrinsically
unworthy but because they are not subjected to as many rhythmic variations as
the standards. "Memories of You," a solo feature for Roberts, begins
promisingly, with wrinkled blues shadings and Thelonious Monk-like rhythmic
hesitations, but falters as a result of Roberts's attempt to cram the entire
history of jazz piano, from stride to free, into one three-minute performance.
There are two versions of "Cherokee," both taken at a tempo considerably less
punishing than the one that Charlie Parker set when he reharmonized the song as
"Ko Ko," in 1945, but punishing enough to tongue-tie Marsalis. He redeems
himself, however, on a lovely interpretation of Benny Goodman's old sign-off
theme "Goodbye" and a straightforward reading of "New Orleans" that comes
across as a modernist's heartfelt tribute to Louis Armstrong.

THE question of Marsalis's influence is tricky. Even without him, musicians in
their twenties might be looking back two decades for inspiration, to the period
before John Coltrane's death, in 1967, and the gradual defection of Miles Davis
and his sidemen to high-tech funk--the last time when there was anything
approaching general agreement on what constituted the state of the art. But
inasmuch as Marsalis's emergence identified this anachronistic impulse as a
movement, such subsequent arrivals as Branford Marsalis, the alto saxophonist
Donald Harrison, the drummer Marvin "Smitty" Smith, and the trumpeters Terence
Blanchard and Wallace Roney are Wynton's children.

Despite his large stylistic debt to Wayne Shorter, Branford Marsalis once
seemed the most promising of these young musicians, but he has failed to
deliver. His mastery of his instrument is impressive, and so is his grasp
of jazz history. Called on to evoke Ben Webster's burly savoir faire in
"Take the 'A' Train," on Mercer Ellington's Digital Duke(GRP
GR1038), Marsalis performs the task admirably. But Renaissance (Columbia
FC-40711), his own most recent album, suggests that his ability to mimic
different styles is not necessarily an asset. Each of his phrases seems to
be enclosed in quotation marks: not only "Wayne Shorter" but "John
Coltrane," "Sonny Rollins," and "Joe Henderson," too. All that is missing
is "Branford Marsalis."

Donald Harrison and Terence Blanchard are from New Orleans, like the Marsalis
brothers, whom they succeeded in the Jazz Messengers. The recent Crystal Stair
(Columbia FC-40830) is typical of the four albums they have made as co-leaders
of their own group since 1983. The level of musicianship is high, and there is
as much rhythmic detail and acceleration of tempo as on Marsalis Standard
Time--Volume 1, but Harrison and Blanchard lack Wynton Marsalis's command of
dynamics, and the result is that each track is indistinguishable from the one
before it. The Marsalis brothers are the models for Harrison and Blanchard,
which means that Crystal Stair sounds like the 1965 Miles Davis Quintet twice
removed. On Eric Dolphy and Booker Little Remembered Live at Sweet Basil
(ProJazz CDJ-640, available only as a compact disc with a companion cassette of
the same material), Harrison and Blanchard are cast in the roles of the two
late musicians, who were among the most individualistic in jazz. The other
participants in this 1986 New York club session are the pianist Mal Waldron,
the bassist Richard Davis, and the drummer Ed Blackwell, all reprising the
roles they played on the original Dolphy and Little recordings, recorded at the
Five Spot in New York in 1961. Although Blanchard is out of his depth trying to
capture Little's melancholy, Harrison surprises the listener with searing
improvisations that are satisfying in their own right, if too conventional in
pitch to evoke Dolphy.

Marvin "Smitty" Smith, once the drummer in the Harrison-Blanchard group, makes
his debut as a leader with Keeper of the Drums (Concord Jazz CJ325), an album
that owes much of its vibrancy to Smith's savvy in recognizing the individual
abilities of the members of his ensemble--Wallace Roney, the trombonist Robin
Eubanks, the pianist Mulgrew Miller, the bassist Lonnie Plaxico, and the
saxophonists Steve Coleman and Ralph Moore--and his allocation of solo space in
a way that shows each off to best advantage. Coleman's angular phrasing is well
suited to the Dolphy-esque "Miss Ann," for example, and the sanctified
call-and-response patterns of "The Creeper" are custom-made for the blues-based
styles of Roney and Miller. Roney's Verses (Muse MR-5335), which benefits from
Tony Williams's tidal-wave drumming, is more of a blowing date, and this proves
to be an advantage on "Slaves" and the title track, two themeless blues with
crescendoing solos by Roney, Miller, and the tenor saxophonist Gary Thomas. But
on the remaining tracks, including the Miles Davis-Bill Evans composition "Blue
in Green," these three soloists adhere too timidly to the guidelines set by
Davis, Evans, and Coltrane in 1959 on the famous original.

ON all these recent albums rhythm is secondary to pulsation, and harmony is
frequently suspended in the interest of mood. In that sense these albums recall
those Miles Davis made for Columbia in the middle sixties and those his sidemen
made for Blue Note during the same period, with a stable of like-minded
musicians that included the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, the trumpeter
Freddie Hubbard, and the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. What gave the Blue
Note albums urgency was their moderation while a revolution was going on
elsewhere in jazz, in the more iconoclastic music of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman,
Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Archie Shepp.

These newer records convey an urgency, too, but it is the urgency of fighting
the clock, of insisting that there is still adventure to be found in a
twenty-year-old style of jazz that represented a cautious retreat even when
new. It is not surprising that the musicians, in their twenties, are finding a
ready audience among lifelong jazz fans at least a decade older. Nostalgia for
the recent past is a widespread vice, catered to by the very technology that
was supposed to hurl us into a future from which there would be no looking
back. The new ghosts in the machine include oldies radio, television reruns,
vintage films on video cassette, and Beatles and Motown reissues on compact
disc (a format still so expensive that consumers feel safer sticking with the
tried and true). But nostalgia is a vice to which jazz fans are especially
susceptible. In the late 1960s Bob Dylan and the Beatles won for rock-and-roll
more intellectual cachet than jazz had ever enjoyed, and both rock and
rhythm-and-blues supplanted jazz as music for hedonistic release.

For many listeners, New Age music now serves as the backdrop for meditation
that Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders once provided. It's been a long time, in
other words, since a passion for jazz was regarded as hip rather than quaint.
So a yearning for a time when Miles Davis was a trend-setter both musically and
sartorially is understandable, even among those too young to remember such a
time firsthand.

The underside of this nostalgia is a widely felt anger that discounts the
onslaught of rock in order to put the blame on jazz for its own banishment from
mainstream culture because of its excesses after 1965. Wynton Marsalis gives
voice to this animosity in statements like this one, from a recent interview
with the critic Leonard Feather: "When you come to New York, there's a whole
school of musicians who are called the avant-garde, and you don't really [need]
any craft requirements to join their ranks. All you have to do is be black and
have an African name...." Were it not for the fact that he has no past deeds of
his own to recant, Marsalis could be the spokesman for the jazz auxiliary of
Second Thought, the coterie of mea-culpa-ing former radicals turned
neo-conservatives. Although Marsalis has expressed admiration for Ornette
Coleman, the erosion of standards in the avant-garde is a recurring theme in
his interviews, and because he neglects to name names, he tars all of Coleman's
progeny with his brush. "It's much, much easier to whip up this hasty,
fast-food version of innovation than to humble yourself to the musical logics
that were thoroughly investigated by [the] masters," he recently complained to
Stanley Crouch, once an avant-garde drummer and firebrand poet but now the jazz
critic most in sympathy with Marsalis's reactionary aesthetic.

A good many jazz listeners agree with Marsalis, and much of what he says has
the ring of truth. "Just to think of the arrogance behind a statement like 'I
play world music . . . ,'" he told Feather. "You're admitting that you're
giving non-specific, second-hand treatment to different types of music . . . .
" The avant-garde's naive fascination with ethnic music is worthy of Marsalis's
ridicule. But it is good to remember that in addition to toying with African
thumb piano and doussn' gouni and didjeridoo, the avant-garde restored clarinet
and tuba to the jazz ensemble, to say nothing of importing such suspect
"concert" instruments as violin and cello, thus relieving the inherent monotony
of trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass, and drums (the lineup still generally
favored by Marsalis and his followers). It was also such nominal avant-gardists
of the 1970s as Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony
Braxton, Anthony Davis, and Henry Threadgill who rekindled interest in
composition by avoiding theme-solos-theme formats, and who put jazz back in
touch with its pre-Charlie Parker heritage by reinvestigating ragtime, marches,
Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Jelly Roll Morton.

There is no way to turn back the clock on all that has happened in jazz over
the past two decades, nor should we want to try. To his credit, Marsalis has
brought new audiences to jazz, although the critic Steve Futterman is not the
only one who wonders if all that Marsalis has accomplished is to persuade "his
upscale audiences that jazz could be as boring as they'd always secretly
feared." Those of us who are more familiar with the rich diversity of
contemporary jazz know that boredom isn't an issue so long as the music keeps
evolving. Still, it should give anyone pause to consider that all of the most
intrepid jazz experimentalists are now in their forties or older, while the
leading musicians under thirty see themselves as craftsmen making small
refinements in a time-tested art. Progress is frequently a myth in jazz, as in
most other aspects of contemporary life. But it is a myth so central to the
romance of jazz that the cost of relinquishing it might be giving up jazz
altogether.